what makes it special, to call it a commodity only if it is paid for with money? i mean, what's at stake?
i'm reminded of that bit in Engels was it? About how we think it's prostitution when a man pays a woman for sex; when a man trades his paycheck for sex from a woman with a certificate issues by the state, it's called marriage. i mean,i'm confused about the spontaneous organization of reproduction thing. why is it problematic that the market doesn't organize it?
i find this troubling because i can imagine a world we we don't "pay" for anything, but the same problem to which Marx pointed in his discussion of "commodity fetishism" exists: it obscures from our knowledge any appreciation of how these commodities are the result of *social* production. Which was why I was adamant in saying it's not the "fruits" of my labor that I'm possessive of, but my time. I can't think of one thing I'd produce as a writer, singer, or artist that would ever be the singular fruit of my singular labor. anything I will ever produce will be the collective product of tons of people. This email is the collective product of tons of people.
I'm not clear on how my web design isn't the same as a writer's work or musicians. People steal web site code all the time, change up the name of the site and content, and voila!, they have their own web site.
but back to commodity fetishism. this is obviously an issue people don't want to address because it keeps getting studiously avoided! why does it matter? because of some research i read, years ago, on Sweden, and how they successfully created a more socialist society. One of the reasons it was so successful is that they were able to create a narrative about how such a society was a collective effort, that people worked and contributed to the wider society, not just to make their own lives and their friends and family happy, fed, clothes, etc., but the contributed to that society to feed, clothe, shelter, etc everyone else, who also contrinbuted in return, all strangers whom they'd never meet and never know but whom they all depended on to live fully and freely.
the research then went on to show how this narrative increasingly broke down and, as a consequence, more and more people felt that they should find ways to skate out of paying taxes. They began to barter more in order to avoid being taxed. Etc.
This has always impressed me. Keenan is pointing at exactly this ame sort of problem, and I realy don't understand why everyone wants to avoid it. (I know why Carrol does, but his response is so singularly different from that of most people, I'll be floored if it turns out y'all agree with Carrol! :)
I have no idea what Keenan's politics are, and I wouldn't call him bitter. He's pointing at the way work is denigrated. I'm not saying - and interestingly he's not saying - that work done by other people can only be valued by putting a price tag on it. Interestingly, what he says is that, perversely, as people expect him to devote more and more of his time to the work of distributing his music freely, those very same folks devote increasingly less time to obtaining music. Indeed, they fill up hard drives of music they never even listen to. he is right about that. I know from PirateBay fans. That is exactly what they do: load up their hard drive, grabbing stuff simply because it's free and hardly listen to it.
interestingly, Keenan says that the old bootlegging was done by people who had to actually expend some effort at it; they, in turn, appreciated the music that they bootlegged because they had to, I think Keenan put it, "work for it."
My point isn't to valorize that old bootlegging culture. But I think he's entirely correct to point out that the internet exacerbates the problem. Everyone wants to gawk at Keenan's possessive individualism, but everyone averts their eyes so they don't have to stare, directly in the face, of the possessive individualism of the point click and drool downloader. This is a person acting out commodity fetishism to the hilt, and not one dime has passed in the transaction! Keenan's the shithead for daring to be possessive about his precious music. And not one person looks at the downloader as someone who is expressing that same possessive, competitive, commodity fetishizing individualism that is normally understood as a central part of capitalism!
Yeah: I find this fascinating.
Gar's ideas where interesting. I would point out though that I highly doubt the voting thing will work because it's trivially easy to game the system. and without addressing the problem I pointed to above, about Sweden, you aren't actually addressing the issue.
Recently, we have held contests, giving away <$100 prizes to people. I should have known and warned everyone, but I'd forgotten what I'd seen of similar contests in the past. What happens is, no matter what the prize is, even if it is a totally idiotic "badge" to put on your blog saying you won, people freakin cheat. It's trivially easy to do so. As others in my org pointed out, they've seen cheating happen when there's nothing at stake but winning a game of internet checkers. It'll be trivially easy to set up a robot to cheat at the voting, just as contestants set up a cheatbot so they could win a photo caption contest.
of course, you can say all this is about competitive individualism, and it will all go away in the socialist future. this is Carrol's answer. Few people ever accept his answer. Perhaps you do?
I do happen to think that people will be very different kinds of people in that future. But our different human "natures" (beings) will be different not because some internal being magically changes, but because of the institutionalized norms and social practices we build on the way do and doing construction of that socialist future. Which brings me back to the story about Sweden. They managed to build a "narrative" that held social life together for awhile, but it systematically broke down _because_ not enough thought was given to the need to build the actual social and political practices that continually reproduces the narrative, keeps it alive, and reinforces the need to act in solidarity - by paying your taxes instead of trying to avoid paying them, for example.
How the language of non-rival goods addresses those situations, I'm clueless.
>'Fuck you, pay me' only works if they do in fact have to pay you to
>get the fruits of your labour, because of your market position. Your
>situation as a developer is different in this respect from musicians
>and writers via-a-vis their recordings and writings. There is plenty
>of work organised within capitalism on a wholly or partially
>non-commodity basis, from public health to academia to policing. (The
>labour-power is still a commodity of course.) The pay is then a
>political matter.
>
>What we see in writing and music is a failure of an old form of
>commodification and attempts to find new ways of commodifying them
>that may be successful to some extent, but changing the kinds of
>writing and music work you can get paid for and the amount you can get
>paid for it. The public option seems a superior way of providing for
>infinitely reproducible 'non-rival' goods as Gar says. Admittedly,
>hitching your fortunes to the same wagon as public healthcare and
>academic doesn't seem to have the greatest of prospects at the moment
>either... But, again, we're socialists right?
>
>I'm not making an argument that the arrival of 'free' in itself drives
>us in that direction, or that getting free music and news strikes a
>blow for the revolution. But bitterness doesn't get us anywhere
>either, unless it motivates political organisation.
>
>Mike Beggs
>
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